Our Founders and Pioneers
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Starting Postlip cohousing community
In October 1968 Chris and Jay Mattingly, civil engineer and novelist, met Jan and Sandy McMillan, artist and RAF officer, and the two families began running a not-for-profit shop for themselves and their friends. Soon they began to dream of other ways of sharing. By May 1969 they decided to form a group of families to live together, support one another, create opportunities and still have privacy.
They all wanted to be with one another, working, playing, drinking, arguing, creating, but shuddered at being stuck in one another's pockets. They planned islands of family in a great sea of community. The concept is now called cohousing and they claim they invented it before the Scandinavians, who usually take the credit.
1969 was also the year of touring England, looking for a place to be. They almost gave up, but a friend from outside the group asked “Did you know that Postlip Hall is for sale?”. The next day Jan told the formative cohousing group that she’d offered £20,000 for Postlip (although they were all using overdrafts and no real money).
By New Year’s they'd committed to buying Postlip with money they didn’t have and moved in on 1 July 1970. Cheltenham Rural District Council agreed to mortgage them (through a Wilson Government incentive for housing associations) and a year later the CRDC began to fund conversion work that was already far advanced.
When the first two families moved in, nothing much worked and most rooms were unusable. The children slept where they liked, there were no functioning kitchens and they clustered around one cold-water tap and cooked on camping stoves. They'd never wanted to be communal, but it was forced on them.
As half of the community worked away from Postlip during the day, so renovations could only happen evenings and weekends. The house needed to be cleared – a meeting in August recorded that twenty tons of rubbish was shifted by tin bath and skip, and “Conditions were still extremely spartan, there being, for instance, no hot water in the sole functioning kitchen.”
They all wanted to be with one another, working, playing, drinking, arguing, creating, but shuddered at being stuck in one another's pockets. They planned islands of family in a great sea of community. The concept is now called cohousing and they claim they invented it before the Scandinavians, who usually take the credit.
1969 was also the year of touring England, looking for a place to be. They almost gave up, but a friend from outside the group asked “Did you know that Postlip Hall is for sale?”. The next day Jan told the formative cohousing group that she’d offered £20,000 for Postlip (although they were all using overdrafts and no real money).
By New Year’s they'd committed to buying Postlip with money they didn’t have and moved in on 1 July 1970. Cheltenham Rural District Council agreed to mortgage them (through a Wilson Government incentive for housing associations) and a year later the CRDC began to fund conversion work that was already far advanced.
When the first two families moved in, nothing much worked and most rooms were unusable. The children slept where they liked, there were no functioning kitchens and they clustered around one cold-water tap and cooked on camping stoves. They'd never wanted to be communal, but it was forced on them.
As half of the community worked away from Postlip during the day, so renovations could only happen evenings and weekends. The house needed to be cleared – a meeting in August recorded that twenty tons of rubbish was shifted by tin bath and skip, and “Conditions were still extremely spartan, there being, for instance, no hot water in the sole functioning kitchen.”